Going Green at Maui School for Strings

Anyone who grew up watching Captain Planet on Saturday mornings remembers the pitch: Earth, Fire, Wind, Water, Heart, five rings combining into one planet sized superhero fighting pollution. It was cheesy 90s cartoon logic, but the underlying idea struck a chord with a lot of us: small individual actions add up into something bigger. At Maui School for Strings, protecting the instruments in our care comes first. Our stringed instruments need steady humidity and temperature, which means real energy use we're not willing to compromise on. But teaching music responsibly also means taking care of the place we call home, so over the past few months we've made a handful of changes and investments around the studio aimed at cutting down on waste and energy use wherever we can, small shifts that add up.

Protecting the Instruments Comes First

Violins, violas, and cellos are sensitive to humidity and temperature swings, so a new dehumidifier now runs in the studio to keep conditions steady for the instruments in our care. Climate control runs around the clock for their safety, which does mean higher energy use than a typical teaching space. Instrument care has to come first, but we didn't want to just accept that higher energy use without doing something to balance it out.

Balancing the Energy Load

To help offset the added draw from round the clock climate control, we've made a few changes that cut energy and waste elsewhere in the studio. Timers now run on electronics around the studio, so anything not actively in use during off hours shuts down automatically instead of sitting on standby and drawing power for no reason.

We've also invested in a high tech ventless washer and dryer that uses heat pump technology instead of a traditional heating element. A heat pump dryer moves and recycles heat rather than generating it from scratch, so it draws a fraction of the electricity a standard dryer does over the life of a load. On top of that efficiency, we've started timing our washer and dryer loads to run during the hours our rooftop solar is actively generating power. Instead of drawing from the grid, we're using the sun we're already capturing, so the efficient appliance and the solar timing work together instead of either one carrying the load alone.

Switching to Eco Friendly Cleaning Supplies

We recently retired our old single use plastic cleaning products in favor of a few simple upgrades:

• Solid dish soap bars instead of liquid soap in single use plastic bottles. A single bar lasts much longer than a bottle of liquid soap, so we're buying less and tossing less.

• Bamboo cleaning brushes in place of plastic handled ones that get thrown out once the bristles wear down. Bamboo is fast growing, biodegradable, and just feels better in hand than plastic ever did.

• Concentrated foaming hand soap tablets that dissolve right in the bottle, replacing the single use plastic soap bottles we used to go through one after another.

• Floor cleaner tablets that dissolve in a bucket of water, replacing the jugs of pre mixed cleaner we used to buy.

• Window cleaner, bathroom cleaner, and multi surface cleaner tablets round out the switch, each dissolving in a spray bottle in place of the pre mixed jugs we used to keep on hand. Since we're only shipping and storing tiny tablets instead of gallons of liquid, which is mostly water anyway, this cuts down dramatically on plastic waste and the carbon footprint of getting supplies to Maui in the first place.

  
  

Paper towels have been phased out too, in favor of washable hand towels and cleaning cloths. Between lesson changeovers and instrument care, we used to go through a lot of single use paper. Now it's all reusable and just gets tossed in the wash.

Why It Matters

We want to be honest about what these changes do and don't accomplish. Running climate control around the clock uses more electricity than we used to, and timers, solar timed laundry, and a few swapped cleaning products don't cancel that out. What they do is trim the waste and energy we have control over, so the added cost of protecting the instruments isn't compounded by habits we could have fixed. It's a partial offset, not a complete solution. Captain Planet had it easier with five magic rings. We just have timers, tablets, and a dehumidifier, and we'll keep looking for ways to do better. We're always open to ideas from our MSFS ohana.